


The Millennium Falcon

by MrProphet



Category: Darths & Droids
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-21
Updated: 2017-04-21
Packaged: 2018-10-22 08:57:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10693698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet





	The Millennium Falcon

The Coruscant sun shone down hot and strong as I walked up the walkway to the Steger Mansion. I was wearing a black robe with a black cloak, black boots and belt with a black display handkerchief. I was clean, pressed and sober; I was calling on five million Republic Credits.

The Mansion was a masterpiece of overstatement, towering above the surrounding skyscrapers. The building itself had two, broad wings jutting out from a central spire. On a pedestal halfway down the spire a statue of Gan-quade Steger, hero of the Republic stood triumphant over a fallen Mandalorian warrior, with a decorously clad maiden gazing adoringly up at him from behind. I wasn’t sure if she was supposed to be a real woman or some kind of representation of the spirit of the Republic and I suspected it would be gauche to ask. 

The Mandalorian was propped on one elbow while Gan-quade was gazing heroically into the sky. It seemed to me that Gan-quade was just asking to be killed with one last, lucky shot. Surely a legendary hero of the Republic should know better than to lord it over an enemy who was still armed – and I never heard of a Mandalorian who wasn’t – and conscious?

I was met at the door by a butler; not a droid, but a human with a hundred generations of butlering in his blood. He fit the place so perfectly that for a moment I thought he must be part of the furniture. Even when he moved I was sure he must have come with the house when Steger bought it.

I gave him my card and he showed me into the hall, murmuring that he’d see if the General would see me now. I waited in the dead centre of the hall, well clear of the vases and paintings and sculptures; I knew just enough about art to know that I couldn’t afford to even put a scuff on them at my rates.

While I was waiting a girl sauntered out from one of the side corridors. She was five-foot-nothing with golden eyes and emerald green hair. She stopped when she saw me, adopted a seductive pose and fixed me with a slow, smouldering glance which might have been more welcome if I hadn’t known that this was something else I couldn’t afford to scuff. She was making me all kinds of uncomfortable and she knew it.

“Who are you?” she cooed in a little girl’s voice that did a lot to diffuse that sultry charm of hers.

“The name’s Rawleesh,” I drawled. “Gundark Rawleesh.”

“What are you?” she demanded. “A prize fighter?”

“Uh-huh.” I scratched one of my horns nonchalantly.

She pushed away from the wall and the wall looked sorry to lose her. “You’re making fun of me,” she accused, swaying forward like an ocean wave of sex appeal. “You’re red,” she said.

“Only in places.”

“How many places?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

It takes a lot to get the drop on an old hand like me, but while I saw the swoon coming, I only just caught the girl before she hit the marble floor. She put her whole heart into that swoon as well. If I’d been an ace slower than I was she would have hit that marble and cracked that pretty emerald head right open. That made her either a better judge or a crazier gambler than she looked.

As soon as I’d got my arms under her she came to life again, wrapping her arms around my neck and clinging like a particularly amorous limpet.

“I like red,” she told me.

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” I assured her. “I clash terribly with your shade of green.”

The butler sauntered back into the hall and gave the same kind of cough he probably would have given if he’d found me holding half a Fondorian vase in each hand. I responded in kind and handed over the goods. The butler took the girl under one arm and my cloak over the other and ushered me into the august presence of General Gan-quade Steger.

The General was hardly the powerful figure depicted in the statue on the spire. Time and old battle wounds had taken their toll and now the Hero of the Republic hung suspended in a bacta tank. He’d had the tank installed at the heart of a hothouse, which was thronged with fat, fleshy snare-vines. I got too close to one and it lashed out at me with a grasping tendril.

“Good day to you, Mr Maul,” the General said, his voice emerging from a speech box at the top of the tank. “Please excuse the temperature in this room; my life support machines run on an independent fusion cell and the waste heat is quite excessive. Do be careful of the plants,” he added. “I can’t stand the things myself, but my daughter pointed out that the room was like a hothouse and it just seemed the thing to do.”

“My own homeworld is pretty hot,” I assured him. “This doesn’t bother me.”

“Yes; Captain Antilles said you were a tough customer,” General Steger agreed. “He also said you were pretty sharp and knew how to handle yourself. I don’t expect my little problem would call for much rough stuff, but if it did that wouldn’t be a difficulty?”

“It might run the fee a little higher,” I replied. “Depends on the damages.”

“Ah, yes; and your rates?”

“One-fifty a day, plus expenses. I charge an extra hundred in danger money for each time I risk life or limb and we don’t end our relationship until any hospital bills arising from the case have been presented, paid and invoiced as expenses.”

“And do your hospital bills tend to run long?” Steger challenged.

“Never had one,” I replied.

“Well, that speaks well of you,” he accepted. “Very well; I accept your terms, Mr Maul, although I expect you to earn your money.”

“I usually do. So; what’s your trouble, General?”

“Oh, nothing I haven’t earned by embarking on fatherhood too late in life. I have two daughters, Mr Maul, and neither of them is exactly what I would have wished for. I suppose that I must bear the brunt of blame for that. The girls have grown up rather wild, since my health confined me to this tank not long after the younger was born; a skin condition,” he added unnecessarily.

I hadn’t been about to ask; it was none of my business and it was obvious besides that his ‘skin condition’ was nothing more or less than the aftermath of an unsuccessful anti-aging operation. I wondered who he’d been trying to impress and where she’d been while his daughters were growing up ‘wild’.

“You’ve met the younger of my daughters,” Steger noted. “I can see Ysdra’s hair on your tunic.”

I picked the long, green curl from the black cloth. “She’s quite a handful,” I noted.

A long burst of static and feedback exploded from the speaker; after almost a minute of this distorted machine noise, I identified it as laughter. “Mr Maul, you should meet the older girl, and indeed you shall.”

“Is it she who’s in trouble?”

“Caya is trouble,” the General assured me, “but more now than ever. Both of my daughters have run up considerable gambling debts and they have found their own ways of dealing with them. Ordinarily these ways suffice and I ask no questions; that way they don’t have to lie to me. If they had had a mother’s influence…

“But I digress. Ordinarily, as I say, the girls can take care of themselves, but I received a letter three days ago; you’ll find it on the side there.”

I fought a snare-vine for the envelope and quickly read the letter. The gist was that Caya’s creditors were holding her hostage against the General paying her sizeable gambling debts, the exact amount of the payment to be given by a later call.

“Why hire me?” I asked. “You can afford to pay this and barely notice the loss of interest on your checking account.”

“As a matter of principle I don’t deal with blackmailers. I used to have a man who took care of this kind of business for me; Rosten Argo.”

“A Corellian?”

“A former smuggler and bootlegger,” the General affirmed, as though there were no other kind of Corellian. “He’s now my son-in-law, but he disappeared a few weeks ago. I can’t blame him, I suppose – if I speak well of my daughter it’s only because she is my daughter – but I do miss his company.”

I shook my head gently; I’m a private eye, not a confessor. “What is it you want me to do?” I asked him.

“Deliver the ransom and see that my daughter is safely returned,” Steger explained.

“The police will help you with that,” I pointed out.

“It’s more complicated than that,” the General explained. “You see, the ransom isn’t to be paid in money. There’s something else they want; something money can’t buy, so they say; your job will also be to get it for them. If you agree, they’ll meet with you and give you the details.”

“Quite a mystery,” I laughed. “How can I refuse?” The simple answer was that I couldn’t.

“That’s good,” the General said, “but I need to know I can rely on you, like I relied on Argo. If I hire you, will you be representing my interests above all?”

“I’ll do whatever I can to get the job done,” I assured him, “and you have my word that so long as I work for you I’ll be putting your interests first.”

*

I met the kidnappers in a disused office in the business district of CorusCity-17. They’d put in a terminal and a few pot plants to make it look like they had a respectable venture, but the front was as phoney as a Mandalorian’s sympathy.

There were three of them. Their leader was a little toydarian with funny eyes, a fancy suit and a simpering voice; he called himself Espa and he was the ‘civilised’ one. He’d be the one telling me what they wanted. His ‘friends’ were a big wookie – and I mean a big wookie; bigger than most of them – and a young twi’lek with a mean look in his eyes. Espa called the twi’lek Coyl and the wookie ‘Bantha’, which I was pretty sure wasn’t his real name.

When I came in, Coyl was holding a blaster on a girl who sat in a chair, her hands behind her back. I knew this must be Caya Argo; she had blue-black hair, but the same golden eyes as her sister. Her hair was artfully dishevelled, but she looked awful comfortable for a hostage.

I had no sooner stepped through the door than the wookie stepped up behind me and caught hold of my arms. It was a nice move, but somewhat spoiled by Espa’s cowardice.

“Keep the girl covered, Mr Coyl. Bantha, search the man,” the toydarian ordered, which of course meant that the wookie had to let go of me. I jumped up and slammed my head back into Bantha’s face. He howled in rage and lunged forward; I used his own rush to tip him over my back and onto the floor.

Coyl did what I’d expected him to do and took the gun off Mrs Argo to aim at me. Before he could pull the trigger I reached out with the Force and pulled it into my grasp. I reversed the pistol and aimed it at Espa; he froze with one hand inside his jacket. I pulled my laser sword from my belt, lit one blade and held it to the wookie’s throat as a polite suggestion that he stop trying to get up.

He got the message; it smelled like burned dog hair.

At this point, Coyl worked out what his move should have been and put a knife to Mrs Argo’s throat. He was pretty apologetic about it, like he was more afraid of her than she was of him, but I let them think they had a standoff.

“I came here to talk,” I told Espa, “but I don’t like being frisked. Take that hand out of your jacket and tell your boy to put the shiv away until he grows up.”

“And why should we do that, eh?” Espa asked. “You came here for Mrs Argo and unless you want her to die…”

“Coyl doesn’t want to get his hands all messy,” I said.

“I don’t want to get my hands all messy,” Coyl agreed.

“Coyl is going to put his knife away until he grows up,” I went on.

Coyl put his knife away; I can’t honestly say whether he had any intention to keep it there until he grew up.

“Now,” I said. “Your move.”

Espa sighed. “Stand down, boys,” he said. “Honestly, Mr Maul,” he said, appealing to me as though we were old friends. “You can’t get the help.”

“Which, as I understand, is why I’m here.”

That was when Espa told me about the Falcon, a jewelled bird given to the Chancellor of the Republic by the Knights of the Millennial Order as the first payment of rent for their fortress monastery on Maltas. Long thought lost, this fabulously valuable piece of work had recently resurfaced on Coruscant and now every shady dealer on the planet was after it, from Caspaur the Hutt – the Hutt even other Hutts called ‘the Fat One’ – to two-cred grifters like Espa.

So that was how I got involved in the search for the Millennium Falcon, never thinking that I would end up fighting a duel against two lethal-yet-lovely anti-Jedi and sending the woman I came to love down for a long stretch, all because of a promise to a selfish, crippled old man.

It’s funny how things turn out.


End file.
